Anyone who has been on a college campus, especially those of large, public universities like my own, have a general idea of the vast diversity of people one can encounter. Students and faculty from every walk of life stroll the quads and concourses of campus, each with their own stories, backgrounds, dreams and aspirations. Campuses, in turn, are also full of organizations looking to harness this raw human potential for their own means, from student advocacy organizations to the Greek community and research groups. Among the more frustrating of this group are the campus missionaries. Most are incredibly respectful, and often only speak to you if you deliberately approach them.
The other side of the coin exists as well: condescending, somewhat pushy student missionaries approaching people walking alone and querying them as to their beliefs. Two days ago, I was a subject of the advance of one such student missionary. I was finished with classes for the day, and every once in a while I entertain conversations of this nature. We had about a twenty minute discussion in which we compared our systems of belief. Although the nature of the conversation was a tad holier-than-thou and preachy on the missionaries part, it was still enlightening and we parted ways, agreeing to disagree. The enlightenment stemming from the conversation, however, was a question in and of itself: what do I believe? I have been thinking this over since that conversation, and I believe I have come to a basic summary of my beliefs concerning the character of God.
Quick disclaimer: I am still not sure if I believe in a god at all. This is essentially me saying “If there is a god, this is what I think it would be like.”
After learning about the traditional religions, I understood their basic concept: an all-loving, perfect God, who seeks to invite man into his domain after his death, provided he lives by a divinely dictated code. God also intervenes in man’s life, and as such, I considered the traditional God to be an active god. Personally, I didn’t understand or find reason in certain parts of the traditional dogma, specifically around the blessing of free will: why imbue a creation with free will and then punish said creation upon certain exercises of that blessing? It seemed like a carrot-on-a-stick for man, tempting him with the concept of individual agency and free will but punishing him if he doesn’t use it in a certain way. Later on down the line, I discovered the concept of Deism, which declares the existence of a divine, intelligent creator who doesn’t intervene in the universe, thus being a passive god. This made much more sense to me, as it returned to man his agency and legitimate free will. Furthermore, it allowed for a little more wiggle room for the discoveries of science, which I feel traditional religion constricts by ascribing everything to God in one way or another.
Deism thus became the basis of my personal spiritual beliefs, but not entirely. I am the child of two scientists, and was taught scientific ways of thinking, observing and analyzing the world around me from a very young age. Make no mistake, I am a fervent believer in science and I trust in its conclusions. However, I can also admit that science has certain ragged edges, things that the scientific machine isn’t able to render explainable or understandable. These edges were questions, like “Where did we come from?” “How did the universe begin?” and others. However, the question that really catalyzed my belief was far more specific.
In my education in math and biology, I learned about the Fibonacci sequence, the Golden Ratio and their consistent appearance in nature, across many different kinds of life. I understood the concept of evolution well, and it made total sense to me. However, the appearance of this Golden Ratio, this mathematical perfection, seemed to fly in the face of it all. Evolution is built around change and adaptation, yet this ratio shows up and then stays there in the face of the rest of the change. How did this Ratio anchor itself in this way? It occurred to me that perhaps it was supposed to show up.
In a way, the Ratio is beautiful. If I was an intelligent designer with a fondness for the mathematical beauty of the ratio, I would find a way to place it into my creation. At the same time, to be considered beautiful, the Ratio must have had a beholder, which logically implies the existence of a designer. However, this does not imply that everything else is also the product of intelligent design.
This concept of selective intelligent design became another tenet of my belief. God is a passive designer with a fondness for certain kinds of beauty, which led it to add these beauties into its creation. This still leaves a gap in my thinking: I don’t believe that everything was deliberately intelligently designed; evolution produced biological growth, planets were formed through sequences of random events, etc. This gap is resolved by a key change in the idea of God as a designer: instead of thinking of God as a deliberate designer of all things, I instead consider God only to have deliberately designed a collection of sequences that allowed for the random occurrences of evolutionary biology, planetary formation and other things to occur. In the Golden Ratio example, I believe that God planned the use of the Ratio in a biological sequence: randomness and variation was allowed to occur, but God liked the Ratio, so he ensured that certain parts of his sequence would result in the occurrence of the Golden Ratio.
This idea is somewhat hard to follow; even I am still rationalizing it in my head. However, a metaphor comes to mind that, for now, serves as an adequate summary of the idea. Imagine there is a car at the top of a hill. The traditional, active God jumps in the car, starts the engine and drives down the hill. Everything one of those events was under God’s control, and he deliberately guided the car down his desired path. He plans for every consequence of every action: the slowing of the car when he brakes, its acceleration with a push of the gas, a change in direction with the turn of the wheel. My passive God deals with things a bit differently. The car is again at the top of the hill, but he doesn’t get in and drive it. Instead, he disengages the park brake, pushes the car and watches it roll down the hill. He made two deliberate actions within his control to set off a sequence of events which was not in his control. He had an idea of how it might go, but no guarantee that it would proceed in the way he thought. The car could roll down with no incident. It could run off to the side, hit a stone and flip over. That part is out of his control; the only thing that was in his control was setting that series of events in motion.
In summary, I do not believe God deliberately designed the universe or actively intervenes in its events. I do not believe that God is a master architect of each individual thing in the universe. Instead, I see God as the Master Sequencer, setting into motion with a few deliberate actions a multitude of event sequences that have led us to the universe we understand today.
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